True Crime Remains The Red Hot TV Doc Genre, Ampere Data Shows

Nothing is getting in the way of true-crime’s popularity, data from Ampere Analysis revealed in Berlin today.

During a session at Seriesly Berlin designed to explore if documentary tastes are changing, Ampere’s principal analyst, Rahul Patel, revealed that while overall TV commissions in the genre are falling, demand for true crime remains as steady as ever.

True-crime commissions from this decade tipped in 2022, at about 2,500 globally for the half-year, but has since dipped to under 2,000 for H1 in 2026. This is still above the pre-pandemic low of around 1,250 in H1 2020, but has been steadily falling over the past four years.

Despite that, demand in Europe over the past two years has been driven by true crime, which accounted for 651 series orders, way above the second most popular – arts, crafts and culture – at 481. Travel (427), historical (341), nature and animals (312), sports (256) and biography (217) accounted for the next five.

Since 2022, crime docs have accounted for between 15% and 19% of commissions, ahead of the second placed arts, which came in between 11% and 15%, but is trending upwards.

Patel noted that subscription streamers’ doc orders between H1 2024 and H1 2026 comprised 35% crime commissions, with sports second at 20%. In comparison, public broadcasters’ crime doc orders were just 10% of the total, with arts above it at 15%. Commercial free-TV broadcasters just favored crime (18%) over travel (15%), while pay-TV providers unsurprisingly aped SVOD tastes more closely, with crime (30%) well ahead of art (11%). The ‘other’ category accounted for between a third and a quarter for all platforms bar SVOD, which was down at around a seventh.

In a discussion that followed Patel’s presentation, Christian Beetz from Mediawan-owned German producer Beetz Brothers said true crime was “still the strongest genre” for subscription streamers.

Discussing the idea behind his new four-part HBO Max original series Clangold, which premieres tonight at Seriesly Berlin in the German capital, he said the main question was how to break through the cluttered market.

“How do you get to be the talk of the town,” he said. “It’s hard to find the right case. We decided to mix genres, so Clangold is not the classic truce crime series, which is for a certain audience. “There was a twist to it.”

The show looks into a wild German criminal case, where a 100-kilogram gold coin called the Big Maple Leaf was stolen from Berlin’s Bode Museum, with the trail leading straight to the heart of the clan (gang) milieu. The doc focuses on the cat-and-mouse game that developed between the investigators and the perpertrators.

Beetz was able to give an assessment of the SVOD players’ approaches in Germany, having produced shows for most of the global services. “HBO are a different player that comes with an ID of more complex storytelling,” he said. “They are really different to Amazon and Netflix, where it is more about getting audience attention. Clangold gave us space to think about different storytelling.”

Clangold, HBO Max’s first non-fiction original out of Germany, debuts on November 13.